But by far the biggest advantage of IPv6 global addressing will be its capability of facilitating apps that require fast,
plug-and-play connections among peer devices on the edge of the network -- applications such as gaming, IM, VoIP, file sharing,
and multimedia.
“The edge will drive it; the killer app for IPv6 is edge devices that are not static,” says Tom Kershaw, vice president of
VoIP services at VeriSign.
Today, notes Kershaw, enterprises can provision peer connections and apps within their own closed environments, using internal
directories and private address spaces. But IPv6, by allowing mobile devices to maintain persistent global IP addresses, will
enable better direct peer connections via the public Internet -- eliminating the need for triangular routing, foreign agents,
and other inefficient work-arounds for IPv4.
“IPv6 reduces the friction to develop those types of applications,” agrees Steve Anderson, a director at Microsoft’s Windows
Server division. “When devices can issue their own IP addresses and connect to the network anywhere, that opens up a lot of
interesting things.”
Adds Cisco’s IOS IPv6 Product Manager Patrick Grossetete: “If service providers can just simplify the model and decrease the
cost of support, that means they can push more services to end-point users.”
Applied networking
One big proponent of IPv6 for mobile peer applications is the U.S. Department of Defense. Last year, the Defense Department
officially made IPv6 support a requirement for selling to the military.
“They see IPv6 and mobility playing a large role in the future of warfare,” says Alan Bavosa, product manager at Juniper Networks.
“I’ve heard folks talking about putting IP addresses on artillery and rifles … and the ability to move from one place to another
and build a whole communications kiosk with in an hour or two, which you can’t do with IPv4.”
Currently, most major U.S. network providers -- partly reacting to the Defense Department’s mandate -- are experimenting with
IPv6 trials. At least one, NTT’s Verio subsidiary, has launched a commercial service that supports not only native IPv6 (IPv6
packets only) but also dual-stack IPv6 (both IPv6 and IPv4 packets) and tunneling (in which IPv6 packets move through IPv4
environments).
IPv6 is running on the .com and .net top-level DNS servers, and major networking vendors such as Cisco and Juniper support
IPv6 in their products. A few Internet exchange points, such as 6TAP in Chicago, already support IPv6 peering between carriers.
In the consumer-electronics realm, examples of IPv6-enabled applications abound. Nokia already supports IPv6 with its triband
mobile phones and its new 9500 Communicator. Sony’s PlayStation 2 gaming console is IPv6-enabled. Some manufacturers are even
looking at IPv6-enabling smoke detectors so that they can communicate via self-organizing wireless meshes and report to a
central monitoring post.
“The most interesting thing about IPv6 is scale,” MCI’s Cerf says. “It gives you the possibility of having unique addresses
for a very large number of programmable devices -- and the ability to control those devices remotely.”
Cerf also acknowledges some potential overlap with the world of RFID, where identification tags will soon appear on products
in both enterprise and consumer environments. “The RFID world is sort of flirting with IPv6,” Cerf says. “But right now, these
[RFID tags] are passive devices. In order to make IPv6 useful, they’d have to be a fairly robust piece of hardware that can
run complicated protocols.”
So when do we upgrade?
Despite the forward movement around IPv6 in recent years, for U.S. businesses the perennial question lingers: When can enterprises
expect to see IPv6 offerings from the major ISPs? And when should they start upgrading their own environments to IPv6 and
investing in applications that leverage IPv6?
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